Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

gVim is great on windows. I use it on linux at home and "gVim portable" when i'm away from my own computer.

It has fancy color schemes, code completion, and with some plugins, it gets much of the niceness of textmate for rails development. Stuff like shortcuts for moving between the method you're in of a controller, and the associated views, tests, and helpers. I'd say it's a very viable competitor to textmate, although it doesn't have the ease of use or "intuitiveness" that textmate has.

If you're interested, I'd recommend picking up the rails plugin, the project plugin, and perhaps the database plugin that the rails plugin can co-operate with (I've forgotten the name)

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

If you're looking for a good development platform with code completion, syntax highlighting, clean integration of the language, gems, plugins etc... try NetBeans 6.0 (http://www.netbeans.org)

Even though it is known primarily as a Java editor/tool, the latest version (6.0) has received a great deal of attention from its development team to ensure you can use NetBeans to develop Ruby and JRuby based applications.

Not only that, but it's cross platform (Windows/Linux/Mac), Open Source and free.

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Tomorrow (Monday) SapphireSteel Software will announce a new, low cost version of the Ruby In Steel IDE which will come complete with Visual Studio 2008 (Ruby language plus ERb/HTML and JavaScript support) at no additional cost.

I'll give you more details after the official launch. Or visit the site this time tomorrow... ;-)

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Hello all,I am new to these forums and first would like to say 'hi'.

I saw this thread and it got me interested.

I must say that being a Windows user I got really disappointed in my editors after watching Ryan's 94 Railscasts all in TextMate. Aside from not understanding why all rails programmers use macintosh (when it is clear as glass that mac's are just overpriced pc's) I also got angry at not having such an editor as TextMate.

At first I got a false impression that the advantage of the textmate was it's pretty interface. This proved false, because there are even prettier text editors with prettier interfaces for windows (the names escape me now, but I had them installed at one point).

Now, the advantages of TextMate it seems lie in:1. Ability to operate on the whole directory structure (ie. rails project)2. Useful shortcuts (things like automatically surrounding text with <%= %>, indenting a few lines at a time with keyboard etc...)3. Fast load/startup time and small memory footprint (at least that's how it seemed to work)4. Integration with Rails (e.g. ability to extract partial, switch to a related view of a controller etc..)

It is only after identifying these advantages, and seeing which ones are important to you, can you start looking for editor in Windows that's suitable.

By looking at the most common editors we see them fail in at least one point of the above. The most common is 3) - They take LOONG time to load (o.g. aptana, netbeans, Visual studio + plugin) and/or hog a lot of memory/or are slow while running.

Editors such as E, lack the 1) - operation on the whole rails project, instead opening few files at a time.

If the conditions 1) and 3) are satisfied it is almost certain that the condition 2) - useful shortcuts is absent. Leaving us with indenting each line separately or aligning the "end" clause manually (by the way Aptana is horrible with letting users indent code themselves).

What I would say is that there is NO Ruby on Rails IDE (or text editor) for Windows that satisfies all the 1-4 requirements above. That is for normal people, at least.

There is ONE alternative. But it is not meant for an average windows user. It is an editor called Vim. It's windows alternative is dubbed GVim. It satisfies all 1-4 requirements above.

1) There is a rails+project plugin that opens the whole rails project2) Shortcuts are at the heart of vim, + plugin called "surround" takes care of surrouding with things like <%= %>. TextMate cannot even compare in terms of shortcuts. (Can textmate copy a line and paste it 20times over in 4 keystrokes?)3) Gvim loads instantaneously, takes about 10-20 megs of ram, works fast4) I'd say the integration with rails is even better then with TextMate. Watching Ryan do a partial extraction in one of his screencasts, he had to manually create a "collection" for a "for" loop. Whereas my vim did this automatically by detecting there was a for loop in there.Furthermore it supports Generation, Migration, Rake tasks all from WITHIN gvim editor itself. But this is just a little bonus to make up for the lack of a normal terminal in windows.

So, there you have it. If you are a normal person and not on Mac - then go with any of the editors out there. All of them are equally (more or less) sucky.

Should you happen to want to spend a month or two on just learning the IDE, or already familiar with Vim - go with Gvim. It sure beats TextMate. (Even better in vim Linux - you get a Terminal too!)

6. After you install all these you need to regenerate your help - otherwise you can't get some sweet docs like ":help Rscript"Inside vim navidate to your vim71 directory, just do::cd E:\Program Files\Vim\vim71Then do::helptags doc

Some commands:-to create a new project in the current folder issue command :Rails appName-:Rproject - when at least one of your rails-project files is open(or when you are in your applications folder), opens the whole rails application-To surround code with <%= => , select it in visual-mode then type:s=Note: The above works only in Views! Where you actually need <%= =>This works for other things (like h1 tags):-Select text to put into a tag-type::s<h1>

Sorry I couldn't write more, if your really need it I can post one up in more detail. Cheers!

Re: The "best" Rails IDE for Windows

Hi,In my search for some information on how to integrate payment processing I came across this forum and felt compelled to join and ad my tuppence worth to this discussion.

As a relatively new Ruby/Rails developer but with 18 years desktop development I went on a search for a decent windows IDE for Ruby and came across RadRails which I have found to be totally AWESOME and comeing from a traditional IDE (VB/Delphi) platform I have found it to be extremely simple to get into and the community edition is extremely well supported and totally free with everything I could wish for (at the moment)

What you want and what you need are too often not the same thing!When your head is hurting from trying to solve a problem, stop standing on it. When you are the right way up you will see the problem differently and you just might find the solution.(Quote by me 15th July 2009)